This summer, when the baseball bat of God started to beat into my head the importance of daily prayer, I was able to get a nice routine going with morning prayer. Even if I didn’t get to any other focused prayer during the day, it was a great way to get my day going in the right direction and get myself focused on God and what was really important in my life.
And then school started.
My mornings begin now at 5:30am and we all have to hit the ground running to be out the door by 7:00. There are breakfasts and lunches to make, hair to comb, backpacks to round up, diapers to change…
So I figured I would just get up an extra 10 minutes before the chaos begins. Right. Molly has vetoed that pretty well. As soon as I roll out of bed she is searching for her human pacifier, and once she is up that early, she just needs to be held and bounced and is just not all that prayerful.
My morning prayer has not been happening now until around 2pm, which is totally not what I had in mind.
I wondered what a priest might do when the demands of life come at him so quickly. I’d imagine that they have their crazy days just like me. Ok, maybe not just like me. I am pretty sure they never have their prayer time interrupted by an explosively poopy diaper – the kind of thing you just can NOT put off dealing with. But then they may encounter similarly urgent calls away.
It struck me that a lot of a priest’s job is prayer – the mass, the sacrament of Anointing of the Sick, and more…
Now I am no priest. That much is obvious. But I do my part in bridging the gap between Christ and others. And maybe sometimes that is my prayer.
This is no excuse not to have some focused time in prayer. I have already posted twice that one cannot pray without ceasing without spending some time in prayer, consciously willing it. But I am a mother, and God is the one who put me in this job (with the help of my husband) so He must know that there is some way this can bring me closer to Him. Part of that is making it my prayer.
Saint Philip Neri made sure everyone knew his door remained unlocked so that whenever he was needed, they should get him. He said that even if he was in the middle of prayer, they were to come to him if someone needed help.
In his view, his vocation was from God and therefore fulfilling it by answering people’s needs was service to God. Therefore leaving God to tend a dying person, for example, was replacing one act of worship with another, rather than stopping worship in order to work.
I was glad to learn that state-of-life duties always supercede our religious obligations. God doesn’t want us to neglect our families in order to worship Him, and sometimes I think God accepts the frustrated desire to pray as a prayer in itself.
For myself, what I did (and it worked) was I asked my guardian angel to find me 20 minutes a day to say the rosary. I know those times happen, but I don’t usually recognize it until afterward. So I asked him to be completely mercenary about it: let me know when those times were coming up so I could say the rosary. He seemed agreeable to this, because now it’s been over four years and I haven’t missed a day since. But I have to be absolutely flexible about finding that time whenever it may come, and many times I do get interrupted and have to go back to it afterward.
Advice about prayer doesn’t always fit for parents of small children. I like your idea of doing the mothering as a prayer, but I’m not sure I could put that into practice. 🙂
Boy, I can relate. I keep telling myself I’m going to get to it. I appreciate the insight, and I like Philagelus’ suggestions, too.